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hubie writes:

Operating system for quantum networks is a first:

Researchers in the Netherlands, Austria, and France have created what they describe as the first operating system for networking quantum computers. Called QNodeOS, the system was developed by a team led by Stephanie Wehner at Delft University of Technology. The system has been tested using several different types of quantum processor and it could help boost the accessibility of quantum computing for people without an expert knowledge of the field.

In the 1960s, the development of early operating systems such as OS/360 and UNIX represented a major leap forward in computing. By providing a level of abstraction in its user interface, an operating system enables users to program and run applications, without having to worry about how to reconfigure the transistors in the computer processors. This advance laid the groundwork for the many of the digital technologies that have revolutionized our lives.

"If you needed to directly program the chip installed in your computer in order to use it, modern information technologies would not exist," Wehner explains. "As such, the ability to program and run applications without needing to know what the chip even is has been key in making networks like the Internet actually useful."

The users of nascent quantum computers would also benefit from an operating system that allows quantum (and classical) computers to be connected in networks. Not least because most people are not familiar with the intricacies of quantum information processing.

However, quantum computers are fundamentally different from their classical counterparts, and this means a host of new challenges faces those developing network operating systems.

"These include the need to execute hybrid classical–quantum programs, merging high-level classical processing (such as sending messages over a network) with quantum operations (such as executing gates or generating entanglement)," Wehner explains.

Within these hybrid programs, quantum computing resources would only be used when specifically required. Otherwise, routine computations would be offloaded to classical systems, making it significantly easier for developers to program and run their applications.

[...] In addition, Wehner's team considered that, unlike the transistor circuits used in classical systems, quantum operations currently lack a standardized architecture – and can be carried out using many different types of qubits.

Wehner's team addressed these design challenges by creating a QNodeOS, which is a hybridized network operating system. It combines classical and quantum "blocks", that provide users with a platform for performing quantum operations.

[...] QNodeOS is still a long way from having the same impact as UNIX and other early operating systems. However, Wehner's team is confident that QNodeOS will accelerate the development of future quantum networks.

"It will allow for easier software development, including the ability to develop new applications for a quantum Internet," she says. "This could open the door to a new area of quantum computer science research."

Original Submission

aliks writes:

Slashdot also featured this story, via bleepingcomputer.com summary. The original story is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/03/31/analyzing-open-source-bootloaders-finding-vulnerabilities-faster-with-ai/

At first I thought this would be an advert for Microsoft Copilot tacked onto a tale of security hounds doing their stuff with vulnerabilities in GRUB2, but it does seem that AI saved some time for the investigators, and the article is worth a read.

Here is my summary:

"By leveraging Microsoft Security Copilot to expedite the vulnerability discovery process, Microsoft Threat Intelligence uncovered several vulnerabilities in multiple open-source bootloaders, impacting all operating systems relying on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot as well as IoT devices. The vulnerabilities found in the GRUB2 bootloader (commonly used as a Linux bootloader) and U-boot and Barebox bootloaders (commonly used for embedded systems), could allow threat actors to gain and execute arbitrary code.

Using Security Copilot, we were able to identify potential security issues in bootloader functionalities, focusing on filesystems due to their high vulnerability potential. This approach saved our team approximately a week's worth of time that would have otherwise been spent manually reviewing the content. Through a series of prompts, we identified and refined security issues, ultimately uncovering an exploitable integer overflow vulnerability.

[...] Through a combination of static code analysis tools (such as CodeQL), fuzzing the GRUB2 emulator (grub-emu) with AFL++, manual code analysis, and using Microsoft Security Copilot, we have uncovered several vulnerabilities.

Using Security Copilot, we initially explored which functionalities in a bootloader have the most potential for vulnerabilities, with Copilot identifying network, filesystems, and cryptographic signatures as key areas of interest. Given our ongoing analysis of network vulnerabilities and the fact that cryptography is largely handled by UEFI, we decided to focus on filesystems.

Using the JFFS2 filesystem code as an example, we prompted Copilot to find all potential security issues, including exploitability analysis. Copilot identified multiple security issues, which we refined further by requesting Copilot to identify and provide the five most pressing of these issues. In our manual review of the five identified issues, we found three were false positives, one was not exploitable, and the remaining issue, which warranted our attention and further investigation, was an integer overflow vulnerability."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The UK's technology secretary revealed the full breadth of the government's Cyber Security and Resilience (CSR) Bill for the first time this morning, pledging £100,000 ($129,000) daily fines for failing to act against specific threats under consideration.

Slated to enter Parliament later this year, the CSR bill was teased in the King's Speech in July, shortly after the Labour administration came into power. The gist of it was communicated at the time – to strengthen the NIS 2018 regulations and future-proof the country's most critical services from cyber threats – and Peter Kyle finally detailed the plans for the bill at length today.

Kyle said the CSR bill comprises three key pillars: Expanding the regulations to bring more types of organization into scope; handing regulators greater enforcement powers; and ensuring the government can change the regulations quickly to adapt to evolving threats.

Additional amendments are under consideration and may add to the confirmed pillars by the time the legislation makes its way through official procedures. These include bringing datacenters into scope, publishing a unified set of strategic objectives for all regulators, and giving the government the power to issue ad-hoc directives to in-scope organizations.

The latter means the government would be able to order regulated entities to make specific security improvements to counter a certain threat or ongoing incident, and this is where the potential fines come in.

If, for example, a managed service provider (MSP) – a crucial part of the IT supply chain – failed to patch against a widely exploited vulnerability within a time frame specified by a government order, and was then hit by attacks, it could face daily fines of £100,000 or 10 percent of turnover for each day the breach continues.

"Resilience is not improving at the rate necessary to keep pace with the threat and this can have serious real-world impacts," said Kyle. "The government's legislative plan for cyber security will address the vulnerabilities in our cyber defenses to minimize the impact of attacks and improve the resilience of our critical infrastructure, services, and digital economy."

upstart writes:

Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings - Schneier on Security:

Cell Phone OPSEC for Border Crossings

I have heard stories of more aggressive interrogation of electronic devices at US border crossings. I know a lot about securing computers, but very little about securing phones.

Are there easy ways to delete data—files, photos, etc.—on phones so it can't be recovered? Does resetting a phone to factory defaults erase data, or is it still recoverable? That is, does the reset erase the old encryption key, or just sever the password that access that key? When the phone is rebooted, are deleted files still available?

We need answers for both iPhones and Android phones. And it's not just the US; the world is going to become a more dangerous place to oppose state power.

Posted on April 1, 2025 at 7:01 AM • 56 Comments

See also: Yes, border control can go through your phone. Here's what travelers should know.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Dawn Aerospace aims to make transporting things to space - whether supplies to the ISS or pharmaceuticals for testing - cheaper, faster and greener:

It has all the qualities of an aircraft but with its rocket engine, the Dawn Mk-II Aurora can fly faster and higher than any jet.

"We have a real path to this being the first vehicle that flies to 100 km altitude - the border of space - twice in a day," says Stefan Powell, a co-founder of Dawn Aerospace.

"No one's ever done that."

Dawn Aerospace is a New Zealand company working on developing greener and more convenient alternatives to traditional space transportation.

By now the company has over 120 employees spread across its headquarters here and in the Netherlands, but Powell says it all started with a group of university students who had a shared goal.

"We decided we wanted to break the European altitude records for sub-orbital rockets, so we got together and we started building quite big rockets.

"To do that we actually needed to develop new propellants that were appropriate for students to use because rockets are generally pretty complicated... so we actually ended up developing entirely new classes of rockets," he says.

After convincing the Spanish military to let them use their base in the south of Spain as a launch pad, Powell and his classmates successfully broke the record in 2015.

This was during a time where satellite launching really started ramping up, but Powell says it was clear this trajectory wasn't sustainable. For example, some of the fuels used for satellites were incredibly toxic.

"A teaspoon of hydrazine in this room will kill everyone, it's just gnarly and toxic. It's a great propellant - don't get me wrong, it's worked super well for 70 years now so there's a reason that they use it - but it's mostly militaries and governments and whatnot that have billion-dollar budgets that can deal with this level of toxicity," he says.

[...] Right now the plane can fly to sub-orbital level, i.e. the border of space, but the ultimate goal is to get it flying all the way into space twice a day.

"That's always been the dream," he says.

Powell says the Aurora will also offer a easier, cheaper way for various other space activities, including for scientists developing new medication.

"They already go to the International Space Station for that. But that's tens of millions of dollars per test that they want to do, it takes years to actually get on station and then years to actually get your sample back. But with us, they'll be able to fly multiple times a week at a much much lower cost."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Neuralink, Synchron, and Neuracle are expanding clinical trials and trying to zero in on an actual product.

Tech companies are always trying out new ways for people to interact with computers—consider efforts like Google Glass, the Apple Watch, and Amazon’s Alexa. You’ve probably used at least one.

But the most radical option has been tried by fewer than 100 people on Earth—those who have lived for months or years with implanted brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs.

Implanted BCIs are electrodes put in paralyzed people’s brains so they can use imagined movements to send commands from their neurons through a wire, or via radio, to a computer. In this way, they can control a computer cursor or, in few cases, produce speech.  

[...] The impression of progress comes thanks to a small group of companies that are actively recruiting volunteers to try BCIs in clinical trials. They are Neuralink, backed by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk; New York–based Synchron; and China’s Neuracle Neuroscience. 

Each is trialing interfaces with the eventual goal of getting the field’s first implanted BCI approved for sale. 

“I call it the translation era,” says Michelle Patrick-Krueger, a research scientist who carried out a detailed survey of BCI trials with neuroengineer Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal at the University of Houston. “In the past couple of years there has been considerable private investment. That creates excitement and allows companies to accelerate.”

That’s a big change, since for years BCIs have been more like a neuroscience parlor trick, generating lots of headlines but little actual help to patients. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Japan's government-backed chipmaker Rapidus has begun adjusting equipment in order to start test production of wafers later this month. The company, which aims to begin high-volume production on its 2nm-class process technology by 2027, plans to complete the first test wafers by July, according to Bloomberg. After that, the company intends to release process design kits (PDKs) to early customers and offer them an opportunity to prototype their designs.
 
  Rapidus began installing semiconductor production equipment, including ASML's advanced EUV and DUV lithography systems, into its Innovative Integration for Manufacturing (IIM) facility in Chitose, Hokkaido late last year. By now, the company has probably reached the 'first light' on wafer milestone with advanced tools, so it is reasonable to expect it to be able to start pilot production of its own circuits using its 2nm fabrication process that relies on gate-all-around transistors.
 
  One of Rapidus' main advantages over established players like TSMC, Samsung Foundry, and Intel Foundry is projected to be its fully automated advanced packaging capability that will operate at the same fab as the wafer processing, something no company has done yet. This would greatly speed up the production cycle for designs that require advanced packaging. However, for now, Rapidus will only offer pilot production of semiconductor wafers themselves and will not offer test packaging services.
 
  Rapidus is currently setting up a new research and development center, named Rapidus Chiplet Solutions (RCS), at Seiko Epson Corporation's Chitose Plant, located next to the IIM facility. Preparatory work for RCS has been ongoing since October, 2024, and starting in this month, the company will begin installing production equipment at the site, focusing on post-fabrication stages. The facility will be used to build a pilot line aimed at developing scalable manufacturing techniques. Work at RCS will include advancement of redistribution layer (RDL) interposer structures, three-dimensional packaging methods, assembly design kits (ADKs) for complex back-end operations, and known good die (KGD) testing processes.
 
  "The construction of the IIM manufacturing facility at Rapidus has progressed smoothly, and by the end of last fiscal year we had completed the installation of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment necessary for the start of pilot operations," said Dr. Atsuyoshi Koike, representative director and CEO of Rapidus. […] "With the approval of the NEDO project plan and budget, we will start up the pilot line in April, which will steadily lead to the start of mass production targeted for 2027."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An alliance of cloud service providers in Europe is investing €1 million into the Fulcrum Project, an open source cloud federation tech that gives an alternative to local customers anxious about using US hypercalers.

Speaking to The Register, Francisco Mingorance, Secretary General at the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) association, explained that as part of the settlement reached with Microsoft last year an innovation fund was set up using Microsoft's cash.

Some €1 million of that has now been allocated to Fulcrum, an open source project to aggregate products from smaller tech vendors to rival the hyperscalers, he said.

"It's happening," he said. "There's been work going on for over a year on this, you know, coding and everything, testing, proof of concept...

"We cannot wait another five years. I mean, the sector lost half of its market share in four years to hyperscalers."

According to CISPE, the project marks "a significant step towards European cloud sovereignty" and is designed to "enable European cloud providers to pool and federate their infrastructures, offering a scalable and competitive alternative to foreign-controlled hyperscale cloud providers."

[...] Led by Opiquad, the open source code of the Fulcrum Core Project was officially unveiled at last week's CloudConf in Turin, Italy. Things are moving fast – Mingorance told us the team is aiming for July 2025 for "the first aggregated services available for purchase composition."

Emile Chalouhi, CEO of Opiquad, told The Register, "I think this is the only way to actually be able to finally create a common digital market.

"Smaller providers have access to resources that they didn't have before, and in locations where they didn't have them before."

[...] "Our goal here is to go to the market ASAP. We don't have all the superstructures that you might have in a lot of these other European projects.

"We don't have to mediate with the politicians or with a public project or with all these things. We're just building it, bottom-up to go live, and everything that's really bottom-up needs to be open, public, and go to the market fast."

[...] There is growing unease in Europe from some customers in the public and the private sector that are no longer happy to rely on US-headquartered cloud providers, so it seems the Trump administration is a galvanizing force for change overseas as well as on US soil... or in the clouds.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A robotics and machine learning engineer has developed a command-line interface tool that monitors power use from a smart plug and then tunes system performance based on electricity pricing. The simple program, called WattWise, came about when Naveen built a dual-socket EPYC workstation with plans to add four GPUs. It's a power-intensive setup, so he wanted a way to monitor its power consumption using a Kasa smart plug. The enthusiast has released the monitoring portion of the project to the public now, but the portion that manages clocks and power will be released later.

Unfortunately, the Kasa Smart app and the Home Assistant dashboard was inconvenient and couldn't do everything he desired. He already had a terminal window running monitoring tools like htop, nvtop, and nload, and decided to take matters into his own hands rather than dealing with yet another app.

Naveen built a terminal-based UI that shows power consumption data through Home Assistant and the TP-Link integration. The app monitors real-time power use, showing wattage and current, as well as providing historical consumption charts. More importantly, it is designed to automatically throttle CPU and GPU performance.

Naveen’s power provider uses Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, so using a lot of power during peak hours can cost significantly more. The workstation can draw as much as 1400 watts at full load, but by reducing the CPU frequency from 3.7 GHz to 1.5 GHz, he's able to reduce consumption by about 225 watts. (No mention is made of GPU throttling, which could potentially allow for even higher power savings with a quad-GPU setup.)

Results will vary based on the hardware being used, naturally, and servers can pull far more power than a typical desktop — even one designed and used for gaming.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A newly discovered bacterial weapon against fungi can kill even drug-resistant strains, raising hopes for a new antifungal drug.

Fungal infections have been spreading rapidly and widely in recent years, fueled in part by climate change. Some fungi, including Candida auris, have developed resistance to some highly effective antifungal drugs which have been in use for decades. So scientists have been searching for new drugs to keep fungi in check.

Researchers in China may have found a new type of antifungal called mandimycin, the team reports March 19 in Nature. Mandimycin killed fungal infections in mice more effectively than amphotericin B and several other commonly used antifungal drugs. It even worked against resistant C. auris strains.

Bacteria are masters at fending off fungi, says Martin Burke, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “There’s been this war raging for 2 billion years,” he says. Bacteria and fungi have been “building weapons to try to compete with each other for nutrients in the environment.” Humans have been spying on both armies to learn how to make antibiotics and antifungal drugs. 

In one such mission, Zongqiang Wang of China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing and colleagues combed more than 300,000 bacterial genomes looking for possible weapons against fungi. One strain of Streptomyces netropsis contained a cluster of genes that encode enzymes for building the compound mandimycin.

The antifungal has a backbone structure similar to some other antifungal drugs but has two sugar molecules tacked onto its tail. Those sugars are important for how the molecule kills fungi, because they change the target that the weapon is aimed at.

[...] Instead of ergosterol, mandimycin is attracted to phospholipids, the major building blocks of membranes, Wang and colleagues discovered. It’s the sugars on the tail that allow mandimycin to target phospholipids, particularly one called phosphatidylinositol, the team found. Removing those sugars caused mandimycin to latch on to ergosterol, though more weakly than existing antifungals.

While intact mandimycin proved to be a potent fungi killer, it was far less toxic to mice’s kidneys and to human kidney cells grown in lab dishes than amphotericin B. Bacteria escaped mandimycin unscathed.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

More doubt is being cast over the US CHIPS Act program with the Trump administration threatening to halt payments unless companies in line to receive funding commit to substantially expand their own investments.

President Donald Trump has issued an Executive Order to establish a new office within the Department of Commerce titled the United States Investment Accelerator.

The office's aim is "to encourage companies to make large investments in the United States," and among its powers will be oversight of the CHIPS Program to maximize the benefits for taxpayers, the White House states.

This move follows earlier calls by President Trump to scrap CHIPS Act funding entirely, and any remaining money to be allocated to cutting federal debt.

According to reports, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has indicated that he intends to withhold CHIPS Act grants already agreed in order to push the companies involved to substantially expand the projects they have planned.

The aim is to force semiconductor makers promised grants and subsidies for building new manufacturing facilities on American soil to invest even more, without increasing the size of federal grants. This follows the example of TSMC, which earlier this month pledged to spend $100 billion to expand its US fabrication plants.

However, that $100 billion figure disclosed by TSMC chief CC Wei during his meeting with Trump was merely an estimated price tag for plans the company had in the pipeline anyway. Intel's former boss, Pat Gelsinger, also pointed out recently that while TSMC is building fabs in the US, it is keeping its research and development in Taiwan.

"If you don't have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor leadership in the US," Gelsinger said at the end of last week.

His old company finalized an agreement with the Department of Commerce in November to receive up to $7.86 billion from the CHIPS Act, which would make it the largest beneficiary of the federal government's cash, if it actually receives it all.

That was also conditional on Intel retaining control of its foundries, amid talk that the troubled Santa Clara-based biz was potentially looking to spin them off as part of a restructure. Intel has since announced it is delaying some of its fab buildout, such as pushing back the completion of its $28 billion Ohio plant until at least 2030.

Gelsinger had previously stated that without CHIPS Act funding, Intel would continue to build new fabs in Arizona and Ohio, however the expansion would take longer, and it wouldn't be as comprehensive.

canopic jug writes:

Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer have co-authored an essay about the essential nature of data integrity in the future of the WWW. (There is an alternative link to the essay published in the Communications of the ACM hosted at the ACM's digital library.) The ability to verify the origin of data and that it has remained unchanged and unmanipulated is becoming increasingly important. Basically they call for a verifiable chain of trust for data production and usage.

The risks of deploying AI without proper integrity control measures are severe and often underappreciated. When AI systems operate without sufficient security measures to handle corrupted or manipulated data, they can produce subtly flawed outputs that appear valid on the surface. The failures can cascade through interconnected systems, amplifying errors and biases. Without proper integrity controls, an AI system might train on polluted data, make decisions based on misleading assumptions, or have outputs altered without detection. The results of this can range from degraded performance to catastrophic failures.

We see four areas where integrity is paramount in this Web 3.0 world. The first is granular access, which allows users and organizations to maintain precise control over who can access and modify what information and for what purposes. The second is authentication—much more nuanced than the simple "Who are you?" authentication mechanisms of today—which ensures that data access is properly verified and authorized at every step. The third is transparent data ownership, which allows data owners to know when and how their data is used and creates an auditable trail of data providence. Finally, the fourth is access standardization: common interfaces and protocols that enable consistent data access while maintaining security.

Although they focus on the ability to prove the origin of data, an obvious risk is that the chain of trust becomes a chain of surveillance. In some ways this essay overlaps with a few of the topics brought up in Bruce Schneier's 2016 post on thoughts about integrity and availability threats.

Previously:
(2025) 10 Years on After 'Data and Goliath' Warned of Data Collection
(2025) Biggest Privacy Erosion in 10 Years? On Google's Policy Change Towards Fingerprinting
(2023) Snowden Ten Years Later - Schneier on Security
(2014) If You Read Boing Boing or Linux Journal, The NSA is Watching You
... and more

Original Submission

Hyper writes:

On May 9 2012 Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, aka 'The Two Guys from Andromeda', started a kickstarter campaign to make a new Space Adventure in the style of the Sierra Space Quest series. In April 2024 the kickstarter completed with a successful release of the game on Steam and as the promised DRM version to kickstarter backers. This is good news for anyone looking for the nostalgia from old PC point and click gaming. Kudos to the Two Guys team for bringing this project to fruition.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model:

Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they're trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model's developers. This means that we don't understand how models do most of the things they do.

Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they're doing what we intend them to. For example:

• Claude can speak dozens of languages. What language, if any, is it using "in its head"?
• Claude writes text one word at a time. Is it only focusing on predicting the next word or does it ever plan ahead?
• Claude can write out its reasoning step-by-step. Does this explanation represent the actual steps it took to get to an answer, or is it sometimes fabricating a plausible argument for a foregone conclusion?

We take inspiration from the field of neuroscience, which has long studied the messy insides of thinking organisms, and try to build a kind of AI microscope that will let us identify patterns of activity and flows of information. There are limits to what you can learn just by talking to an AI model—after all, humans (even neuroscientists) don't know all the details of how our own brains work. So we look inside.

Today, we're sharing two new papers that represent progress on the development of the "microscope", and the application of it to see new "AI biology". In the first paper, we extend our prior work locating interpretable concepts ("features") inside a model to link those concepts together into computational "circuits", revealing parts of the pathway that transforms the words that go into Claude into the words that come out. In the second, we look inside Claude 3.5 Haiku, performing deep studies of simple tasks representative of ten crucial model behaviors, including the three described above. Our method sheds light on a part of what happens when Claude responds to these prompts, which is enough to see solid evidence that:

• Claude sometimes thinks in a conceptual space that is shared between languages, suggesting it has a kind of universal "language of thought." We show this by translating simple sentences into multiple languages and tracing the overlap in how Claude processes them.
• Claude will plan what it will say many words ahead, and write to get to that destination. We show this in the realm of poetry, where it thinks of possible rhyming words in advance and writes the next line to get there. This is powerful evidence that even though models are trained to output one word at a time, they may think on much longer horizons to do so.
• Claude, on occasion, will give a plausible-sounding argument designed to agree with the user rather than to follow logical steps. We show this by asking it for help on a hard math problem while giving it an incorrect hint. We are able to "catch it in the act" as it makes up its fake reasoning, providing a proof of concept that our tools can be useful for flagging concerning mechanisms in models.

We were often surprised by what we saw in the model: In the poetry case study, we had set out to show that the model didn't plan ahead, and found instead that it did. In a study of hallucinations, we found the counter-intuitive result that Claude's default behavior is to decline to speculate when asked a question, and it only answers questions when something inhibits this default reluctance. In a response to an example jailbreak, we found that the model recognized it had been asked for dangerous information well before it was able to gracefully bring the conversation back around. While the problems we study can (and often have been) analyzed with other methods, the general "build a microscope" approach lets us learn many things we wouldn't have guessed going in, which will be increasingly important as models grow more sophisticated.

There appears to have been a problem with the update of the Poll. Some made comments before the Poll appeared on the front pages - or so it seems. How they accessed it I do not know. The Poll released at the programmed time but comments that had already been made seem to have been lost. I am investigating the cause.

My apologies to anyone who had already made a comment. All I can do is ask that you make your comments again. We have not seen the problem before so if anyone can provide additional information that might help in identifying the cause it would be most useful. Did you access the Poll via the front page? If not, can you explain how you did access it please? Which browser are you using? Did anything appear 'different' to when you usually access the site?

[Addendum: The poll displayed on my front page has reverted to the previous poll again. If anyone else has seen the same please confirm in a reply to this Meta.] After a minute or so it returned to displaying the correct Poll.